


The Traveler

by orphan_account



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: Aliens, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Romance, Science Fiction, The Expanse Fandom Exchange, The Investigator - Freeform, protomolecule
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 14:50:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15932663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The Eros incident is far from the end of Julie and Josephus's story. After all, It says there is work to be done.





	The Traveler

**Author's Note:**

> For @random-fandom-ness for the Expanse Fandom Exchange, based on the prompt "Protomolecule Ghosts exploring the cosmos". I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Spoiler warning: The Expanse (show) up to 3x13

“ _If you fall for me, it ain’t gonna be for halfway”_ Josephus’s voice is hoarse, the sound choked by the infection beginning to burn him from the inside out.

They are on the floor, though Julie couldn’t remember when or how the filaments had shrunk, then disappeared depositing them there. Julie realizes that she _is_ the floor as well, not only the girl resting on it. She must have wanted to get out of the pilot’s seat and the thing must have let her. But it was all so hazy…

The filaments support her in a half-sitting position and in turn, her form supports the dying man leaning against her shoulder.

They are close now, close to Venus, close to the end maybe. But they are close to saving Earth and close to being consumed by the _work_. And he is close to death, or at least of from the life they’d known before.

She can feel him, hear his mind, his heart and history if she listened. His whole life is spread out before her, as accessible to her as her own mind and memories. The Belter Detective, the man who was hopeless and who thought she saved him, blind to the awful person she must have been once to take Eros as she did. Once the home of thousands, the thousands that had become her swallowed by the infection she’d brought them.

Or maybe he knows, maybe he doesn’t care, as she doesn’t; finding it impossible not to love that which she understands so completely.

His thoughts are confused, warped by the shared infection as everything is, and nearly indecipherable. There is relief there, shame there, affection there, _love_ there, but blurred and distorted by the fear. He is scared, growing more scared, and more scared still with every choking, gasping spasm that wracked his body.

Julie tightens her numbed hand around his, her other arm drawing around his waist. And she ‘hears’ him feel the things she could not; the chill of her hand in his in sharp contrast to the infection burning through him.

_I am not afraid of falling._ She tells him, not speaking, simply trusting he would hear her.

Suddenly, she is alone again, alone in the company of one hundred thousand souls. And she is in pieces. Sometimes, she is two, or three things, in two or three places simultaneously.

Julie is lost among the multitudes of souls lost on Eros. She is all of them, but she was separate; the seed crystal, patient zero, the Pilot. She has no form but for the _everything_ that was Venus and the wreckage. She loses everything in its expanse, sometimes the lost parts of come back, then redisperse.

Sometimes, she is all of Venus, left only with the impressions of Josephus’s consciousness in her programming.

But the man is gone, maybe lost like she is, waiting for the Protomolecule to give them their next task. Maybe it was forever, and he was _gone and gone and gone,_ and what was left behind is what she holds inside her consciousness.

For countless days, or weeks, maybe years, it’s impossible to know really; she wants only to get him back.

Then, Julie wakes up somewhere else in the loose sense of the term ‘wake up’, it’s more of an appearance, really.

Suddenly she is one, and she’s _smaller,_ standing in a body she recognizes as one that used to be hers, wearing her white racing suit, her hair pulled into a low ponytail.

She is standing on a cliff, surrounded by still air, dead silence, and red rocks. Small slopes growing taller towards towering peaks of the rock stretches for miles on either side, the dull reds, browns, and greys barely distinct from each other in the distance. The sky above them is the clearest vibrant blue, sprinkled with glittering silver stars; unlike anything she’d seen back on Earth.

“Julie,” she turns, and Josephus is there, standing behind her, a question on his face and in his voice. He steps a bit closer, the movement not disturbing the rocks, his words the only thing disturbing the dead silence around them.

Julie could see his thoughts, he must have seen hers. He’s been where she was, lost on Venus for an unknown length of time. He wears a dark jacket over blue slacks and a button up shirt, on his head rests a brimmed hat. Not what he’d looked like before, on Eros, but the man she’d seen in her dreams as she died. The image is immortal-- what she sees now, she saw then. And what they see of each other ripples back and forth across time and space, pulling them closer together.

They are not the same; an Earther, a Belter, a cop, an agent, a dreamer, and a skeptic. But they are the same, the sort who refuse to play the role expected of them, the sort who would traverse every galaxy to end up here again; at the other’s side.

She wants to take his hand, but, hearing the thought, he takes her. Now she feels it, the touch is cool and firm, pulling her back from the edge of the cliff until she stands before him. Her feet move as if on air across the rocky ground, her new form exacting no effect on her environment.

“Where are we?” A smile plays across her lips, at another interaction beginning with the question. Speaking is unnecessary yet it feels strange not to at first.

Josephus shrugs. “Somewhere _it_ wants us to see.”

Julie nods. Nowhere near her old home, maybe the old home of the protomolecule or its creators, or a clue in his case. “It’s beautiful.”

Josephus nods, eyes fixed at a point beyond her shoulder, a mountain in the distance.

“Let’s look around.”

And so they do, their fingers still laced together, taking turns leading the other in a new direction. They wander, fluctuating between easy silence and speaking. Sometimes they speak without words, simply letting the mutual stream of consciousness carry the conversation for them.

It’s the second time she’s seen his face, but it doesn’t seem to matter, decades of history lay between them now.

Time is strange here. They may have been walking this planet for hours or for months, but the landscape never changes and no sun or moon rises in the sky.

_It wants me to go away._ Josephus tells her. They’re sitting side by side in a grotto in one of the mountains; their hands are linked, her head is resting against his shoulder.

Red fireflies, reminiscent of the room on Eros adhere to the ceiling, an insect, maybe, the second instance of extraterrestrial life. The walls are washed with the red light and the water in the small pool is the color of wine, but Josephus’s face remains ghostly grey-blue and Julie thinks he almost looks like he’s glowing too.

_Away to where?_

_Home._ He says first, then amends the statement. Nothing from before is home now. Home is a concept almost too foreign now. _The Belt. We need their help._

Julie knows why, she’s part of it all too. She supposes she knew Josephus was leaving too. He is The Investigator.

_How long will you be away._

The question isn’t exactly asked, they both knew that not even _it knew_ how things would play out once the Investigator made contact. It had been so long since she hadn’t known something.

_Will you still be here?_ It wasn’t an impossible notion, splitting him to pieces, dividing useful and useless parts of a soul.

Josephus shakes his head, he doesn’t know what it will do to him and make of him to continue the work. _I’ll be in touch._

Josephus leans over and kisses her, his hand coming to rest at the back of her neck. She closes her eyes as though it were an instinct, then fluttered open again when his hand lifts off her neck moments later. She thinks he has pulled away but she opens her eyes to empty air.

The Investigator is gone for a long time, even in the confused haze where time passes and doesn’t pass. Where he is, time does pass.

Julie stays behind. She sees the Investigator as she stands on the cliff on the far-off red planet. It isn’t _Josephus,_ not the person she understands better than anyone she can remember knowing, it is a version twisted almost beyond recognition.

It is as thought he barely recognizes himself, talking to James Holden in metaphors and allusions, barely able to finish a thought. It’s hardly a wonder that Holden thinks he’s going crazy.

Julie watches it all, the humans beginning to piece together the meaning of the Investigator’s words, watching as they all got stuck in the Ring. _Had she made the Ring?_ She thinks, maybe, that she did, but everything before the red planet is fading into the background. The only thing that remained clear was the scene on Eros, the Investigator’s-- _no, Josephus’s_ , death.

She is losing, losing sight of what her life had been on Earth, who she had been before coming part of the work.

Yet, conversely, the Investigator remembers who he once was. The more time he spends with James Holden, the more she recognizes Josephus in the words and actions of the Investigator.

It isn't happy, watching it’s programming unspool, the complex creature it had built to bring the humans to them brought low because Holden asked about _Julie_.

The red planet changed; freezing water poured from the sky. It goes through her, she feels nothing of it, no chill, no dampness. Nothing affects her, she is untouchable and unreachable, except for the Investigator, and for so long, he doesn’t care and cannot remember.

The Investigator does not reach out.

_Did it kill you? Did it tear you apart one atom at a time? Or did you burn?_ Julie hears James speak, as though he’s talking right in her ear.

It snaps, something around her, in her, in them breaks and unfurls and self-destructs. Something that was one is in pieces, one hundred thousand unified pieces, they work together but they are not one. And the red planet, the rocks under her feet and the hail falling from the sky are _gone and gone gone._

_I’m gonna need a ride._ Because they are still _it_ , but _it_ is no longer them. And they can’t go anywhere alone.

The red planet disappears in a smeared wash of colors, and she feels like she’s spinning and spinning, left to right and head over heels. Everything is black and flashing luminescent blue.

She doesn’t expect it, but she is not scared. Something tells her that nothing can hurt her, that it is simply time for her to move on.

So it is. She reappears in a ship. Somewhere they’ve been before, or someplace she knows from Josephus’s memories.

Julie stands alone in a bunk room, facing the narrow berth built into the wall. To the side, there is a door, open and leading to a small washroom. Behind her is the door to the hallway beyond, it’s closed.

She knows it won’t open, not for her.

She sits on the edge of the berth, the mattress doesn’t dip or squeak in reaction to her touch. It supports her but looks empty from the rest of the room, she’s a girl made of air and light, so to the humans, she is nothing.

To _it_ , she is The Pilot. She will get them to their destination.

The door opens, Naomi and James step inside, the Investigator follows them. The humans don’t see her, but he sees her. He always sees her.

“We’ll talk later, kid.” The Investigator says.

James sputters. “Miller, you promised me answers.”

Naomi’s hand lays itself on his shoulder, she asks him what’s wrong and James just shakes his head, and tells her that the Investigator is gone.

He hasn’t gone anywhere, Julie can see him right in front of her, but he is not the Investigator as they say, the Investigator is gone. _Josephus Miller_ stands before her, and he has a new case.

Naomi follows Holden out of the room, shutting the door panel behind her.

Josephus reaches for her and she stands and allows him to pull her close to him. Her heads rests just above his heart, and she can see blue light turning brighter, and whiter where she touches him. It is stronger where there is no distance between them, no difference between them for it to navigate. Where she touches him, she feels warmth, and weightlessness, where the work is continuing somewhere beyond their consciousnesses.

_You were here before, looking for me._

_They’re going to help, Holden always does._ His hand moves through her hair, along her back, his fingers scraping against the fabric of her racing suit. After so long, the noise almost surprises her.

_You disappeared._

_I told you I was going away. I couldn’t hear you._

It’s so quiet, there in their moment. No background noise regurgitated by the protomolecule, no sounds echoing across its vastness. Something has changed, maybe everything has, because she’s almost alone again. She knows and _knows_ and continued to learn the things she must know, but the minute the Investigator changed, they were all altered.

The last voice she can hear now is Josephus’s, and he’s thinking it too. Until they came together again, it wasn’t clear. Julie supposes it was bit of a pattern in her life, nothing was supposed to be clear until they collided, again and again. Just like _it_ wanted.

_What do you think we’ll find?_

_Answers, maybe. Or more questions. But it wants answers._

_We have the time._

_I used to sit here, after Eros._

_You had my picture?_

Josephus chuckles. _Suppose I did._

Julie can see the picture, the echo of him, sitting on the bunk, picture in hand. Her eyes were downcast, the angle of the photo looking down on her. She sees nothing in the picture, not a shred of what she is now, and nothing before the now mattered.

_I’m sorry._

The image of Josephus on the bed is gone, she cannot find it again within her.

_I’m here now._

She pulls him towards the bunk and they sit, like in Josephus’s hallucination, or maybe, just like themselves _._ Maybe everything that came before now is a reflection of now. And this is how some part of each of them, or some part of _it_ always knew it was going to end up.

They stand on a flat, hand-in-hand, nothing around to see for miles and miles but light of the stars and the deep blue of the sky reflecting on the damp ground. On the ground, footsteps are fading, the only remaining evidence that someone other than the two of them had set foot here.

It was the fifth planet they’ve visited in their search for clues, they have clues and clues and no conclusions. Their crew doesn’t flag, and they need no rest. Answers are distant, maybe, or perhaps, waiting for them here. There is no knowing, only searching.

They are the Traveler.

_The Traveler, I kind of like that._ Josephus wonders, responding to the thought that crosses her mind.

_Always listening, aren’t you?_ She responds, letting that flash of affectionate frustration speak for itself.

_Maybe you’re never quiet._ Josephus pushes back, but the way he says it sound like _I love you._

Julie wraps her arms around his neck and kisses his cheek, her head comes to rest in the space between his head and shoulder. And the way she does it says _I love you too._

_Where do you want to go next?_ The Pilot asks The Investigator.

_Wherever you go next._

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, comments/feedback appreciated!  
> -sinara-smith


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